Valerie Harper is honored to portray Golda Meir

May 28, 2006|By Sid Smith, Tribune arts critic

She was unprepossessing, even drab, a grandmotherly figure with a hangdog face and swollen legs, hardly the look of someone born to the limelight.

But in her day, in the realm of geopolitics, Golda Meir stood firmly at stage center. She played a pioneering role in the establishment of Israel, and, from 1969-74, she served as its prime minister, a rare woman in a mostly male pack.

And there was something else. Something awesome, inducting Meir into a rarefied club to which few wish to belong. She had her finger on the proverbial red button, in charge of her country's nuclear weaponry. And for a brief, hair-raising spell in 1973, during the make-or-break conflict for Israel known as the Yom Kippur War, she contemplated using it.

Instead, she persuaded Richard Nixon to cave to her demands and provide Israel critical aircraft. But, in the process, she became that uncommon human who stares into the face of the nuclear abyss. And she didn't blink.

"You could call it blackmail, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't," says Valerie Harper, TV's one-time Rhoda now touring as Meir in William Gibson's one-woman drama, "Golda's Balcony." It runs May 30-June 11 at the refurbished and renamed LaSalle Bank Theatre. "She was tough, solid in her commitment and unmovable. She felt Zionism was nothing if not the rescue of the Jews. Her strength came from her own personal moral assurance that the Jews were never again to live on the sufferance of others."

Unsuccessful first effort

Gibson first dramatized Meir's life in a conventional, multicharacter play, "Golda," in 1977. It flopped.

"I was less interested in Golda than in Israel as seen through her life, and I remained dissatisfied with what I'd written," he said in written answers to questions submitted in advance in deference to his age (he's 91) and hearing difficulties.

"I came back to the material when I learned about the [nuclear] weapons at Dimona, in her hands during the '73 war," Gibson continued. "And what I saw here was a theme only superficially about Jews and Arabs. It was really about all human history. My Golda says, `What happens when idealism becomes power?'"

And his Golda's answer: "It kills."

"Golda's Balcony" proved a success for both Gibson and actress Tovah Feldshuh, who created the role. The 2003 off-Broadway venture moved to the Great White Way, where it became the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history. Considering Gibson's much earlier and most famous work, the 1959 "The Miracle Worker," about feisty young Helen Keller and her indomitable teacher, Anne Sullivan, Gibson seems drawn to strong women.

"Is there another kind?" he asked. "Well, the two most formative women in my own life, my mother and my wife, were ladies of considerable force. But in the theater, I use history as allegory. `The Miracle Worker,' for instance, explores the story of Helen and Anne as an allegory for the struggle of the Artist [the playwright, say] to make his inarticulate material speak.

"All historical material, when used by a playwright, becomes autobiographical," he continued. "My `historical' plays I think of as very personal, even confessional."

"Golda's Balcony" is set up as oral autobiography. Meir is seen in her dying days, recalling vividly the agonizing period of the 1973 war and this crucial act in her leadership. But she also has time to reminisce about her entire life.

She was born in 1898 in Kiev, Ukraine, watching helplessly as a young girl as her father nailed boards to the door to stave off attackers during pogroms. The family emigrated in 1906 to America, where Meir grew up in Milwaukee, a Midwestern seasoning that would help her later negotiate with U.S. leaders. Though married, she was not meant to be a housewife, and, despite her husband's objections, they moved to Israel in the 1921 and lived for a time on a kibbutz.

Founding mother

She worked with the labor movement and attended the 1939 Zionist convention in Geneva. In 1948, she was among the signers of the declaration proclaiming the establishment of Israel -- a founding mother, as it were. She served as minister of labor and as Israel's foreign minister, a woman who, in the words of one admirer, was "a true mover of mountains." Her time in the prime minister's office included the 1972 terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics. She died in 1978.

But "Golda's Balcony" wisely also includes quaint personal touches as part of its portrait. In recalling the intransigent resistance to the establishment of an Israeli state, Meir quotes this exasperated instruction from an Iraqi foreign minister: "Mrs. Meir, go home to Milwaukee." She labels famed one-eyed defense minister Moshe Dayan "a busy lover," and then notes, somewhat naughtily, "I always wondered, did he take the eye patch off?"

Some critics charge "Golda's Balcony" is too reverential. Meir, while still beloved in America, is viewed more skeptically in Israel, they argue, charged with weakening the Labor Party and with the heavy casualties of 1973.